On Döblin and speed: part of Döblin's style is so inconspicuous that it took me hundreds of pages to realize the effects it was working: much of the prose posed relative to the characters' thoughts and feelings is relatively undifferentiated from that of other characters (whose consciousnesses may also be expressed by nearby sentences, though usually not too nearby), and indexical words and phrases are made to do more work in determining the meanings of the sentences than in 'more standard' novelistic prose. At times I can even catch myself making the imaginative effort, to keep in mind when I read a sentence who the pronouns refer to, what those characters have just done, what their longer-term relationships have been.